Indeed, an effective and coordinated global relief effort depends on detailed information and communications, and the mainstream media is still an important part of that process. Mediabistro’s TVNewser posted a list of television reporters headed to Haiti, and their colleagues from print and radio will surely join them. But the world owes a measure of debt to new media platforms—which will undoubtedly continue to play an important role in Haiti in the days and months to come—for their assistance in facilitating the early response to this disaster.
[Update, 1:30 p.m.: The Associated Press’s Jonathan Katz is on the scene in Port-au-Prince and the AP has created a Facebook page and Twitter feed as part of its coverage of the earthquake.
“Covering tragedies of the magnitude in Haiti has been a sad part of what the AP has done quickly and reliably for decades,” AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll wrote in an e-mail. “By using Facebook and Twitter accounts to interact with our audience and learn more about what they want to know, AP will strengthen its already dynamic relationship with its member news organizations, other customers and news consumers throughout the world.”]
[Update, 1/14 1:00 p.m.: On Thursday, The Miami Herald announced that, “MiamiHerald.com has been remade to accommodate the huge amount of information and photos coming from Haiti. A part of MiamiHerald.com will be devoted to enabling family members and friends to contact one another and also to share information of all kinds in both Haiti and South Florida.
You will find links to this page, under the title Haiti Connect, on MiamiHerald.com’s home page. We’ll continue this as long as it seems helpful.”]
I was on vacation in Thailand 15 years ago when the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake hammered Kobe (1/17 is the anniversary). People in and around Kobe had an easier time getting an international line than they did communicating across town. My wife and I, from Thailand, became an unofficial message board for friends in the quake zone. Someone said it was because domestic calls were routed through one main trunk line that was severed, but international calls followed a more diffuse route out. This was the early days of the Internet in Japan (then known as the World Wide Web) and the first pictures out came from a friend who picked up his new video camera, hopped on a bike and rode around town dodging emergency vehicles. He was able to get everything out through either the city's or the prefecture's brand new Web site.
#1 Posted by Ken, CJR on Wed 13 Jan 2010 at 09:06 PM
Donations to Haiti have certainly become the talk of Twittertown and FB these past few days. Although there's still a long way to go--the onsite pictures are enough to tell us this--I'm amazed at new media's quick response to Haiti's plight.
But I've also been wondering-how does the Web's reaction to Haiti compare with its response to past disasters like Katrina?
#2 Posted by Audrey Tran, CJR on Sun 17 Jan 2010 at 11:23 PM
I commented and blogged on the fact of the importance of social media tools such as Skype, Facebook, Google and Youtube
http://www.skype4.biz/134/skype-twitter-google-and-facebook-are-haitian-social-media-saviours/
#3 Posted by james wood, CJR on Tue 26 Jan 2010 at 06:56 PM